T2 Trainspotting (2017) / Willard (1971) / The Passenger (1975)

Danny Boyle scored a real winner with T2, the best sequel/spinoff film I've seen this year. It respects the original so much because its a totally natural progression as a story & personal meta-narrative. T2 succeeds because its not someone new giving their version of the old vision. Its the original vision just 20 years more mature and established. So many corporate reboots fail because they decide on a fresh update and re-treading. Boyle makes a great theme out of the past and uses his first entry as a stylistic gimmick, but he (and the material itself) clearly state that they are not suckered by a cheap nostalgia tour. The film is helped tremendously thats its working off a sequel novel, but only loosely.

T2 won't get its props because its one of the rare higher profiled films this year that wasn't for kids, teens or families. This was the only mature 2017 film I've seen that wasn't partly trying to pass itself off as exploitation or a "popcorn film with a message". But the film isn't overly bleak. Its fun, gorgeous, experimental, sincere, thoughtful and a bit abrasive. Its a self-aware mid life crisis for the characters within and outside of it, including our society. Its not interested in returning to the70s, 80s & 90s but analyzing the changes, positive and negative, and celebrating LIFE 20 years later. Its so grateful for its audience and the opportunity to step back into its rare lot in cinema history.

I won't say its better than the original but maybe equal. I didn't want a Trainspotting sequel but this is the film I didn't know I needed. It totally recontextualizes and romanticizes and in some ways eclipses the original. Maybe this is easier to find in European cinema than in American when I think about the charming and welcomed Ab Fab film from a few years back. They are more accustomed to picking up stories again and respecting the virtues of storytelling in commercial filmmaking.

Willard took me by surprise too. I remember the stylish but hollow remake from the 2000s and that both films follow a 1967 novel. I expected a brainless Psycho ripoff with rats eating people. This is much more sophisticated, at least the script is. Its a very introspective study of society's victims and the realistic circumstances that leave them reduced to animal behavior to survive. Willard creates a complex, intelligent metaphor out of its title character. He's a true anti-hero or tragic hero. And the actor Bruce Davison does a lot of good work in the role.

Now the production is not so ambitious but quite memorable. Produced as studios faced a recession, Willard is shot closer to a B&W 1960s thriller TV series like Twilight Zone or Hitchcock Presents. Its very bare bones and muted, but this serves the tone of the film. There isn't much on suspense or action, so we the directing is focused on fleshed out performances and a sense of nerve that creeps up.

But the film is more than a serviceable adaptation of a good story. It surpasses the original text from my understanding in that Willard becomes a catalyst for the zeitgeist of angry youth. It worked well for the political climate then & now. Millennials will relate to the economic and generational abuse this character suffers. He rises into an avenging arm of rebellion, a Marxist. And he suffers a fate that is more poetic and radically leftist than his modest Poe-esque fate in the original tale. He becomes a mirror for the failures of the Love generation and a casualty of class warfare, selling out his own ideals by following the cycle of abuse he set out to destroy. Its heady, very appropriate and shocking for a low budget horror film that could've wasted effort on FX and decor (like the remake and surely the upcoming re-remake).

Jack Nicholson might be the greatest film actor of all-time by body of work. He's made a long list of excellent films because he's worked with some of the best directors of his era: Kubrick, Mike Nichols, Roger Corman, Polanski, Tim Burton, Scorsese and fit all of their esteemed aesthetics. The Passenger unites Jack with influential director Michelangelo Antonioni for a political/existentialist/postmodern/travelogue about identity and freedom. Antonioni loves to create surrogate characters of himself who take on harsh journeys into themselves to either triumph or crumble from their own reflection.

This is the 3rd Antonioni film I've watched and the 3rd in that timeline. Following Il Grido and Blow Up, The Passenger is an even wider and more abstract pilgrimage into the cinematic form. The director is fine playing off established tropes and motifs because he bends them in new ways, like he's revising a world view by performing the same story in vastly different ways. One big distinction is the change in female perspectives in these stories. In this one, Maria Schneider plays a radical youth who acts as a spirit guide or perhaps a siren who leads him to one of two fates. Antonioni might've been a Hitchcock fan because the film builds to an incredibly intense climax loaded with meanings.

"The Passenger" is a sure masterpiece like Blow Up before it, "Willard" is a very tuned in piece of mainstream-meets-counterculture that has aged terrifically & "T2" is a spiritual poem that lives up to the spiritual poem that inspired it. 3 great movies to enjoy forever.

Blow-Up 1966

Just watched this landmark of arthouse cinema for the first time. I'm deeply moved.

I've seen director Michelangelo Antonioni's "Il Grido" before and it had the same effect but this was a different, more open experience. I'm also a fan of De Palma's thematic sequel "Blow Out", so this fills in many dots but retains my love of that film in finding they are only related in minor plot details (though Blow Up is a much better film).

I already watched a great film essay detailing the narrative interpretation of the entire film as a juxtaposition of Modernism & Postmodernism, so I will link it here and then give my own interpretation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlzzfR23s4I

I agree that this film is a Coming-of-Age story; a "Kunstheroman" where an artist matures into his art. Its biographical in that sense as the character reaches Antonioni's worldview through an Antonioni scenario.

Our protagonist is a self-serving cad who doesn't really respect himself, others or his craft, only using it for sex, money and notoriety. But he wants to become a real artist. He photographs so much pain from his subjects and gets off on it rather than feels it himself. In his journey, the gravity of reality lands on him hard and gives him the sense of victimhood that he has given or dismissed in others. He learns that he is a part of an infinite network of things and identities & that his infinitesimal view on things is only personal to him and can never be properly interpreted by anyone else.

Thats what I gathered from the visual language which I think is clear enough. The film is enigmatic, subtle and very lyrical, so very open to interpretation. But the clues and metaphors throughout point to this spiritual outcome. Essentially, this is what De Palma's Blow Out is about, only told in a lurid, purposely lowbrow way. Blow Out is a feature-length re-interpretation/critique of Blow Up for the masses. That makes me love it less but also respect De Palma's ability to do such a thing with more originality and taste than a Tarantino or the more lazy stylists using postmodernism to get off the hook creatively. De Palma was a great stylist and technician who re-interpreted great text. He didn't add anything besides visuals or maybe more commercial plot points. They are not true postmodernists. They are remodernists who use postmodernists in a much less valiant but equally necessary way that the postmodernists use modernists. Its a cycle of creation. Blow Up is special because it is modern and postmodern, not owing gratitude to anything but itself cinematically.

Blow Up isn't a deconstruction of cinema as much as it is a deconstruction of a generation, a culture, a species. I guess all films attempt this but hardly to such a degree or to such an effect, with a clarity and sincerity no less. Antonioni's directing is so elegantly detailed. He explores the form leisurely and none of it seems gratuitous or distracting, thanks to expert pacing and tonality. One amazing game Antonioni plays is with relationships. Things that seem connected are not. Things that seem unrelated are not. Things disappear and reappear or don't. And it all has a rhyme or reason. I suppose this is a kind of simulation of structuralism. But he is also wrapped up in the story for the audience's sake, letting it gradually come into focus once enough seemingly innocuous pieces have stacked up. Its a solid enough plot but its profound in its restraint and rich character. The structure and dialogue are abstract realism. We are never sure if we are to take this film as a dream or something literal and thats the magic.

This was a haunting film and I want to keep it mysterious by not unpacking it too much. I will enjoy this on many future occasions.